Review: Spinetix Fusion

Spinetix has long had an authoring package to build the display material for its amazing little HMP-100 hypermedia player. Hyper Media Director (HMD) is a powerful and sophisticated authoring package for the Windows OS platform. Although I haven’t yet had occasion to use it, I feel quite sure that my 30 years of programming and systems experience in everything from machine code to COBOL, C++ and Lisp, on machines ranging from super-minis to embedded systems, would stand me in good stead to learn enough Scalable Vector Graphics and extend my basic XML and PHP to really make HMD sing on a complex signage project.

SpinetiX has recognised there are an increasing number of digital signage applications that don’t need all the power offered by HMD, and that certainly don’t have the programming budget required to build even a simple signage application with that software. When you have a player that can fit on the back of any monitor, and draw little more current than the LED in the monitor’s power indicator, you’re going to find it used in a lot of small-scale signage applications… which is where the new Fusion authoring software comes in.

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Fusion comes installed in all new HMP-100 and 200 players, and can be installed on all existing HMP-100 players free of charge. Even more useful is that it’s designed for use by just about any mug punter. Better still, it’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a device that displays web pages (round of cheers from the Mac OS, iOS and Linux communities).

To see just how easy it is to use and how readily accessible the player is to configure via the internet, I arranged to take one of the few beta test units out for a spin. In what is likely to be a fairly common configuration for off-site suppliers or contractors, the HMP-100 box was located in an office in Sydney and connected to the internet via a standard business ADSL 2+ link. I initially accessed it from my office at the other end of the country on a similar ADSL 2+ link, and later from our editorial office, via a nominally quicker cable connection. 

As all of these were asymmetric links, with the usual strangulated upload capabilities, the connection speed was effectively a symmetrical connection running at about 1Mbps (roll on the NBN). Even at these speeds Fusion was very responsive, no doubt due to background updates using Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Where an HMP player is being accessed at much greater speeds via the premises wired LAN or even an ancient 802.11g wireless link, Fusion will be very snappy.

Fusion is clearly designed to be used by people with little more experience at building presentations than putting together the occasional PowerPoint presentation for a product launch or a brain-storming session. However, being easy to use doesn’t mean it’s dumbed down. The ability to create a library of presentation components, and then combine those components into a multitude of different presentations, is a very powerful technique. Combined with the sophisticated but simple scheduling system, it allows apparently complex and content-rich signage displays to be built in little time, with limited design experience, and no coding skills.